Grey nomads sitting around their campfires in the Kimberley and staring up into the night sky were given the shock of their lives earlier this week when a bright fireball streaked across the sky.
The startling sight provoked both awe … and some alarm.
A traveller called Cybil phoned ABC radio to say she was camped by the Fitzroy River when she nearly fell out of her campchair.
“It was huge, big; it was the brightest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It was huge, white, massive … I’ve never seen anything so big in the sky.” Another ABC caller, Randal, was camped at the Barn Hill camping area on a cliff overlooking the ocean about 130 kilometres south of Broome, when he saw the light.
“My wife was sitting opposite me and she spun around, and we watched it disappear over inland somewhere,” he said. “It was just so, so bright. We were wondering whether one of those missiles had come down from North Korea … we’ve seen shooting stars before, but this just outdid anything.”
Ellie Sanson, a member of the Desert Fireball Network from Curtin University, said the nature of the observations suggested the fireball may have been of human origin.
“If it was a satellite launch it would make sense that it’s been seen so far afield,” she told the ABC. “The fact that it’s so slow, it could be space debris coming back into the atmosphere as well.”
The glittering tail reported by some observers is also an indication of a less natural origin.
“When it glitters like that, it usually means there are little pieces falling off of it, so it could very well be space debris that is a part of a satellite,” Ms Sanson said. “You’ve still got the option that it’s a small asteroid hitting the Earth’s atmosphere, though they do tend to go quite a bit faster, and it’s unlikely that they’re longer than 10 seconds.”
She encouraged people to report their sightings to the International Meteor Organisation so scientists could investigate. Looking into the night sky and studying the constellations is an increasingly popular hobby for grey nomads. Just last week, the Warrumbungle National Park in New South Wales was designated as Australia’s first International Dark Sky Park to protect the uninterrupted view of the night sky.
